The main fear with storage administrators is the loss of data in business applications resulting in system-wide outages. To restore the data would be costly. Although storage management needs to be made easy for storage administrators, for instance, user friendly to those that may be less experienced in storage administration and to cover the lack of knowledge, if provisioning actions are very user friendly, mistakes can be made more readily as well. For example, drag and drop provisioning is a very popular feature in SAN administration, reducing the complexity of managing a SAN. However, it is also easy to make a mistake using a drag and drop feature.
Accordingly, a storage management system and method that is user friendly and easy to use, but also allow for tighter control so that mistakes are not made easily or to quickly detect and counteract the mistakes, are desirable.
Another area of desirable improvement is the ability to integrate SAN design tools with the SAN management tools. For example, SAN designer technology is available that allows storage administrators or users to setup policies that they desire. It would be desirable to have an import tool that imports the policies for instance, designed through SAN designer technology, into the SAN manager such that SAN manager would capture the intent of the storage administrator, and automatically provision the policies.
Yet another area of desirable improvement stems from the assumption that storage administrators need similar control over their environment the same way as the system administrators in the IT (information technology) world. For example, the storage administrators need to assure that their systems are readily available for business. They cannot afford errors or if there are problems, need to be able to determine very quickly what happened. The current provisioning tools are lacking a mechanism for change control. Therefore, it is desirable to have a system and method that would allow a storage administrator to quickly determine and/or have control over what occurs in the SAN.
For instance, customer's systems may accidentally gain access to restricted volumes and cause outages. Without proper control, it may be difficult for the customer to track what had changed and what action eventually caused the problem. Although guesses can be made as to the source of the problem, for instance, a bad LUN masking operation, there may be no record or proof of it. Thus, there is a need for change control, even in small SAN environments. Even if the only enforcement action is to record a change and report a policy violation, this customer would be equipped with the information of what went wrong, and may be able to prevent the same problem in the future.
The currently existing automatic provisioning supported by various vendors are heavily concentrated on QOS (Quality of Service). Usually, these policies allow the user to determine what level of QOS they want to have and if they want to use zoning versus LUN masking. They are limited in the automated actions they can provide and policies are typically hard-coded and there is a very limited set of policies available. A limited set of events like exceeding thresholds is supported in the existing provisioning tools. Accordingly, wider-coverage of automatic, for instance, event-driven, policy provisioning system and method is desirable.